Thursday, 28 August 2008

From my point of view, giving a general anaesthetic is interesting for about an hour or so. In the first hour you induce the patient, do your nerve blocks and stabilise your patient for surgery. After the operation has lasted an hour or so, I start to get really fucking bored. There’s only so much fiddling with the vapourisers that a man can do before it starts to lose its appeal. Today, I was giving an anaesthetic to a man who needed an 8-hour operation and I tell you – after three hours I was bored, after six hours, I was climbing the walls and by the end, I’d almost lost the will to live. What on earth do you do with yourself for eight hours once you have a stable patient?I tell you what I did - I did some revision, I chatted to the theatre staff, I put on some music, I poked fun at the surgeons and I even read the paper. In fact, I found myself turning into one big cliché!

I know for sure that there’s no way in hell that I could do long operations for the rest of my days – it would drive me crazy